Back in Barrow

I'm back in Barrow again much sooner than I had originally expected. Not because of any problems with the installed IT infrastructure, but they needed someone on short notice to provide IT support. It didn't seem reasonable to me to ask one of the OIT desktop techs to come up here on such short notice especially with Easter coming up. Plus, I need to get other projects up here done. Hopefully, I'll have some time to work on it. I had to "hit the ground running" so to speak since there were a number of problems right off the bat. To compound it, there was a 20 minute power outage this afternoon. The installed UPS on the old server room ran out of juice about 5 seconds before the power came back. Oh well. Thankfully all of the servers came back up without issues. I think that I will head back early to the hut just so I don't get completely exhausted again.

I'm going to miss the 5k race that I had signed up for. That's kind of a bummer. Especially, since I don't really sign up for that many. I ran out to the new building and back a couple of times this afternoon since I needed to go out to one of the modules to debug a problem but it was only about ½ mile round trip. Kind of awkward to run wearing a parka, beaver hat and gloves. But it is still below zero here with a slight breeze.

Thursday Evening - Today was cold and windy but I did manage to get in a couple of miles. As long as the wind is at your back it isn't so bad. It is a bit of a challenge for me dealing with all of the Windows issues here. I have forgotten a lot of things about MS Windows since I don't work with it on a regular basis anymore. To make it worse, all of the BASC machines run Vista. Mostly OS X and Linux for me these days.

Unlike yesterday when it was nice and sunny all day, I'm really freezing in this office. The sun hasn't shown all day and the wind really seems to remove heat from the building quickly and makes it feel much colder. I worked about half of the time in the old building and half in the BARC resolving some minor problems. Some of the projects here are starting to wrap up and folks are making plans to shut down their experiments and get them packed up and shipped back home. But other projects are starting up. Overall, it is a much more interesting and challenging environment for me than back at UAF.